Tuesday, December 18, 2012

I really, really hate that hour or so right before bedtime.
It’s not just that bedtime doesn’t come fast enough (although it doesn’t). It’s
that the kids are invariably bouncing off the walls. They can be little angels
all night long, or little terrors from the moment they walk through the door.
It doesn’t matter. Every single day, that hour before bedtime is a cacophony of
noise and hyperactivity and me fussing at the kids until I’m blue in the face
trying to get them to listen.

These poop. A lot.

Chores? Yeah. Right. But, somehow, it has to be done. The
house needs cleaned. The dishes need to be washed. Cats need to be fed, litter
boxes need to be scooped. There’s no getting out of it. So how do you find time
to fit it into your day?

Bribery.

No, really. It takes a combination of discipline and rewards
to get the kids to do things they don’t want to do, and to get them to do it every single day. They don’t want to.
They’d much rather watch tv or play video games than do the dishes and clean
the litter box every day after school. They’d much much much rather go to their
friends’ houses than scrub down the bathtub or run a vacuum in the kitchen on
cleaning day.

So what happens? I ask the kids nicely. The kids ignore me,
procrastinate, get distracted. I have to ask a hundred times before something
gets done. Eventually, I snap and send them to brush their teeth. The rest will
just have to wait until tomorrow, because I’m going to have an aneurysm if it
doesn’t.

All I want is a little bit of efficiency, darn it. More
importantly, I want to be able to do what I, myself, need to do before bed
without having to hover over my kids like some black mother angel of death to
make sure they’re doing their jobs.

Flying Free

The solution, for me, was to take a page out of my boss’s
book. Every morning, I get to work and get handed an assignment list. My
morning isn’t over until that assignment list is done.

So, we created the Chore List. Every night, I sit down out
write out a list of chores for each kid. Some of those chores stay the same
from day to day. They clean their rooms every night, put away their laundry,
take their medicine and brush their teeth.

Other chores rotate around, so unless I need someone for a
special project or somebody’s sick no one has to rinse dishes or empty out the
litter box two days in a row. If there’s something specific I need them to do,
like vacuum the front hallway, I add it to the list.

Before bed, the kids get the lists and a time I expect them
to be done. Now they know what they have to do and how much time they have to
do it, and they’re responsible for everything else after that. No more telling
them what to do, or nagging them to get it done. They’re responsible for
themselves, and I can hand them their list and move on to doing the laundry.

Oh! Right. The rewards. Each kid gets a weekly allowance for
helping out, which was as much a sanity saver for me as it was to give them
some money-“Mom, can you buy this for me?”is almost never said. It seemed like if I was going to shake up the
system, however, I should find something else to add to the bag. Before we
started, I sat down and put 63 erasers into a bag. When the kids finish their
chore lists, they get to take an eraser out of the bag and put it into a little
jar we have sitting on top of the bookshelf in the living room.

Once all of the erasers are in the jar (which is the rough
equivalent of three weeks of doing their chores every day), they get to
celebrate with a movie night, complete with Chinese for supper. Then we start
all over again.

It works because Chinese is a favorite for all three of
them, but getting Chinese for the five of us is ridiculously expensive. So it’s
something we save for birthdays and special occasions. Doing it once a month as
a “thank you” to the kids for stepping up to the plate is worth it, and
evenings are much less of a headache these days.

And, every once in a while-not often, but once in a
while-the house actually stays clean for a few days in a row. What do you know?

The only real pain in the rear is having to sit down and
write (or type and print) the list out every night. I haven’t found a good
solution to that, but I’m working on it. I’m thinking some kind of magnetic
board…

Anyway. Chore lists. Best sanity saver ever when it comes to
kids and housework. How do you keep things sane and efficient at your house?

For those of you who come here for the quirky quips, the
offbeat quibbles, the general perkiness of it all…come back tomorrow. I
promise, there’ll be more then. In light of recent events, however, I wanted to
take today, pull back the curtain and talk about something that really matters.
Something I, and thousands, if not millions, of moms all around the world,
struggle with every day.

Parenting with depression.

Nobody Knows

It doesn’t seem to matter how much publicity depression
gets, how much people claim to understand it or who says it doesn’t bother
them. At the end of the day, most depression sufferers have something in
common.

They don’t want to admit that they have a problem.

Many of the people who read this will be surprised that
anyone would use the words “me” and “depression” in the same sentence. Most
days, they’d be right. Perky and happy and upbeat and looking at the bright side
of life are mottos I try and live by.

Those are the days I’m winning. Those are the days I can
look depression in the face and say, “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah! I’m taking my
life back!” Sometimes, however, I’m not the winner. That’s when things start to
get sticky.

What Happens After?

There are many things in life that can cause depression to
flare up. The doctor diagnosed it as seasonal, and to an extent he’s right.
Winter’s definitely harder for me. I find myself struggling to keep a smile on
my face when I’m spending day after day inside these four walls in the middle
of winter gray…which is why my living room is currently painted like something
straight out of Seuss!

Snow isn’t the big killer for me, however. Stress is. The
minute I start to feel overwhelmed I just shut down, starting a cascade of fail
that leaves me buried under missed deadlines, late bills, short tempers…and
lost time with my kids.

On the days depression wins, I’m not a great mom. I’m not
even a particularly good mom. As a matter of fact, if my kids get fed and get
to school on time I consider it a job well done. Depression is one of those
things that just swallows you whole. You don’t want to play. You don’t want to
go places. The chitter chatter and constant bickering of little voices that
would normally go in one ear and out the other drives you
absolutely…fricking…insane.

I’m sure it’s different for other moms. For me, if I can’t
deal with life, I certainly can’t do a bang-up job parenting my kids. We get
by. They watch a lot of cartoons. Go into raptures because I lift the limits on
their video games just to get us through the day.

But those days aren’t fair to them, because I know what they
really want, what they NEED, is me. There. Connected. Giving them 100% of my
undivided attention.

Happy Drugs?

The first thing most people ask me when I tell them I suffer
from seasonal and stress-induced depression is whether or not I take
anti-depressants. That’s a hard question for me. I have, for limited periods of
time, taken baby doses of anti-depressant drugs. They help-some. The side
effects inspire me to take them as little as I can possibly get away with.

I’m hoping one day to find a good solution. In the meantime,
I have to keep parenting as best I can and hope one day my kids will look back
and say, “It was enough.” I have to TRY and keep my stress levels down (yeah, I
laughed at that one too) so I can keep my head in the game.

Depression Isn’t a
Stigma

…but very few parents are going to step up to the plate and
admit that they have a problem. If you find yourself struggling, reach out. If
you don’t want to talk to your spouse, talk to your doctor. If you don’t want
to talk to your friends, find a good therapist. (Most of them are covered by
insurance.)

Most importantly, if you find that depression is making it
hard to function, if you find yourself struggling just to get out of bed and
missing deadlines and due dates like there was no tomorrow, ask for help.
You’re worth it.

It seems like the past week has been filled with so much, so
fast, that I’m having a hard time sitting down today to blog. My mind is
reeling. So I’m going to just talk about it all, all at once, and hope
somewhere in there it all makes sense!

Let’s start with Sandy Hook, since that’s what’s on
everyone’s minds this morning. I’m sure you’ve already heard the story. A
troubled young man stole his mother’s guns, killed her, then went to the school
where she’d worked. At last count, 20 elementary students between the ages of 5
and 10 were dead. Parents and siblings throughout the county were mourning
children who had barely had time to live. Teachers, the principal and a school
psychologist lost their lives, and I still haven’t heard what happened to the
heroic janitor credited with giving teachers the heads-up to stay in their
rooms and out of the shooter’s way.

I haven’t sat down to discuss this incident with my kids
yet. I want to. I need to. But I haven’t figured out how to say it. Here, in
the bucolic town we call home, this kind of event is as foreign to them as a
visit to an alien planet. But it’s not. We lived in VA when the horrible
shootings at Virginia Tech happened-my brother-in-law and his wife were both students
there at the time. I was across the street when the sniper shot a woman in the
parking lot of a Michael’s in Fredericksburg, VA, and we’d been at the
Ponderosa he hit by Richmond just a few nights before.

Random violence isn’t something you get used to, and I pray
we never do. I’m not sure how to explain it to my kids without terrifying them.
I can only hope that they learn to be careful, to be aware, to understand that
there’s risk but they shouldn’t let it run their lives.

There was an interesting post this morning on my Facebook
feed talking about letting some of our war veterans step in and act as armed
security guards at schools across the nation. I’m not entirely sure how I feel
about that. I love the idea of giving our soldiers jobs when they come
home-with some additional training in dealing with kids, I think they’d be
marvelous. And it would free up our LEOs for jobs elsewhere.

On the other hand, it makes me sad to think that it might be
necessary. One of the biggest reasons we left the city and moved to a small
town was so the kids could go to a good, safe school, with quality academics
and no metal detectors coming in the doors. We had a “school cop” when I was in
high school. He kept the brawls in the hallways to a minimum, took the time to
take an interest in the kids at lunch, and did a hundred other things
none of us delinquent teens knew anything about.

I do remember, very well, him giving me a hard time for
being tardy when I stopped in to pick up some paperwork after graduation. (I
graduated a semester early.) It was hilarious.

My point is, a single, good-natured officer roaming the
hallways is very different from a gun toting, metal detector using guard.
Because that’s what it would be. A guard. Protecting an area that needs to be
protected, even though it shouldn’t. And…yeah. I got my kids out of the city
just to get away from situations like this one, but I guess there really is no escaping
it anywhere. So we may as well make the best of it, hug our children tight, and
pray for those families who live in areas with so much violence that they take
this kind of thing for granted.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

There are no words to describe how happy I am that this
election is over. Not because President Obama is starting his second term and,
I hope, gearing up to make good on the potential we saw in his last four years,
although I did vote for the man. No, today marks a bigger day for me.

The end of the party-clashing nastiness that has dominated
my Facebook page, news headlines, Twitter stream and much, much more for the
past 12 months.

I went on an unfriending spree this morning in the wake of
party-clashing rhetoric on my page. I’m tired of it. The election is OVER. We
need to work TOGETHER for the next four years if we want to do better than we
have the last four years.

For fouryears, all I’ve
seen in our government is party politics, stonewalling, stalling (to the point
that our government was on the verge of shutting down) and an unwillingness to
compromise. We have financial geniuses in office right now. So why is our
budget off? Don’t tell me it’s because of our president. One man does not an
economy make. Many people are responsible for the mess we’re in, and many
people need to grow the (bleep) up, step up to the plate and fix it.

In honor of that, I propose we send all of our politicians
back to Kindergarten. And I’d like to send the venom-spewing, propaganda
spouting, hateful party members that have made this election the nightmare that
it’s been right along with them. Why? Because if we’re going to have a prayer
of pulling our economy, our government and our way of life into tomorrow while
still in one piece, they need to learn to:

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

I try and turn a blind eye to the smear campaigns rolling
around during election year. I don’t support them. I don’t support the people
hosting them. I SERIOUSLY don’t support the candidates that endorse them.

Sometimes, however, you’ll come across a smear campaign so
widely propagated that you have to say something about it. Because not only
does it make you look unfavorably on the candidate and their campaign managers,
it makes you lose all respect for the person posting.

Yep, I said posting. Because for me, that breaking point was
seeing post after post of smear campaign propaganda posted on Facebook by someone
I like. Someone I’ve known a very long time. Someone I used to have a great
deal of respect for. And someone I will never again be comfortable leaving in
charge of my children.

As a parent, I encourage my kids to express their views. I
also encourage them to use their manners, think before they speak, show respect for their elders and authority figures, stick to the
facts and not try and win an argument by throwing their opponent under the bus.And I expect the adults I entrust with the responsibility of their care to do the same.

“But it’s just a Facebook post!” Your Facebook page is a
representation of your personal brand. What you put on your page, you are
personally endorsing. Being an azzhat on Facebook makes you an azzhat in real
life. Not only because you’re repeating it, but because by repeating it you’re
stating that this is both right and a reflection of your personal beliefs.

THINK before you speak. Be careful what you post. And for
the love of God, can election year be over already?